HPTS 2026 (Day 1)

Jim Gray started HPTS 42 years ago, and it still runs the same way at Asilomar with 0 proceedings, 1 track, 100 invited people, and ample discussion breaks. It's one of my favorite events, and I look forward to attending it every two years. This is my...umm...fifth HPTS. I have been attending all of them since 2015, but I seem to have missed it in 2019. Yep, my life is a blur, even for me.Here are my notes from day 1. I will put day 2 and day 3 in a second post.Keynote: Reality is the Final Verifier. Two Key Gaps in Agentic Software Engineering (Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley)Ion started with the promising parts. LLMs are able to solve difficult math problems, and provide proofs for conjectures that have been outstanding for many decades (Ok, maybe this is not as promising to mathematicians). LLMs also play scientist with AlphaEvolve, and OpenEvolve. In summer 2025 Berkeley ran a seminar where students applied agentic tools to research problems. They took a published state-of-the-art result,…